‘A series of variations on a theme’: Reinvention and Amplification of Decadence in Jeremy Reed’s Dorian: A Sequel

Abstract

This article examines for the first time Jeremy Reed’s novel Dorian: A Sequel (1997). Reed is a queer British writer primarily of poetry, and of lyrical, experimental fiction. He is influenced by a range of figures, including the French Symbolists of the nineteenth century, David Bowie, J. G. Ballard, and others. Dorian: A Sequel is an overlooked, important neo-Victorian response to Oscar Wilde’s novel, and one that predates Will Self’s more famous Dorian: An Imitation (2002). Even though Reed’s Dorian is set in 1897, it amalgamates the fin de siècle and the twentieth century, and even has Dorian encountering Wilde himself. The novel transcends nostalgia and presents a forward-looking, innovative vision of Wildean decadence, one that is amplified in its intertextual artificiality. Through a series of rhetorical gestures and tropes of self-reflexivity, retconning, anachronism, and narrative metalepsis, this article demonstrates how Reed’s decadence imitates and reinvents not just Wilde’s text but its integral formulas of imitation and reinvention.